Premise 1: Science is about describing the natural world with numbers, graphs, figures. We use experiments and do clever tests.

Premise 2: God made the natural world, the reefs and the trees and rats and kiwi and tussock and monkeys. “This is yours,” God tells us in Genesis 1: “I made this world for you to use, to rule over, to take care of. Use it well.”

Where did we go wrong? I often emerge from my lectures grieving helplessly at the numbers and the graphs and figures that science is describing. Figures like how far beyond pre-industrial levels atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen. Numbers describing what this means for the climate, for ocean pH, for our hope of having a planet that looks anything like what every generation of human before us has known. We see what science tells us about the loss of top soil, the kākapō’s probability of surviving into the next century, the way fertilisers have altered the nitrogen cycle and the impact of deforestation.

I wanted to study ecology because it is fascinating and important. I love what I’m learning. Yet it is also often very grim. We are facing the greatest ecological crisis in human history; a sixth mass extinction, a deadly combination of local and global impacts on the planet that are certainly not easily solvable. When I am brave enough to think about it, I struggle not to become depressed and hopeless. How could a loving God have trusted us to take care of creation? Where is God in all that? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’m not sure anyone does.

I think that it is right to be terrified. It is right to grieve. Yet stopping there is dangerous. It takes the trust that this unprecedented crisis is in God’s hands. It takes faith to choose not to be apathetic or selfish. It takes a hope for something incomprehensibly bigger than ourselves to continue to be the kaitiaki of our beautiful planet with all that we have. To look after the creation God gave us desperately, urgently, with everything we have and strength beyond our own.

God knows what science is telling us. But while the natural world is compromised by human greed and selfishness, by massive societal failings as a group of guardians, it is still good, still God’s. This is good: a pīwakawaka in my flat’s garden. This is God’s: the sun rising over the tussock of Silverpeaks, where I went tramping on my last holiday. This is good: the warm body of my friend’s purring cat (wearing a bell to avoid it catching a precious bird). This is God’s: leafless, peeling bark of kotukutuku. This is good: the bright pink flowers of a little geranium weed outside my flat. This is good: preschoolers learning about a possum they caught in their trap. This is God’s: every possum, native bird, bat, bee and seaweed, every weed and native plant. This is good, this is God’s; we are God’s.

Science is extremely important. We have to know the details and extent of the ecological damage we have done to begin to change things. But if we stop at the scary numbers and facts I know we’ll give up. I want to keep learning and protecting God’s creation because of the wonder of it, the mystery, the wildness. I am filled with hope and awe most often when running, tramping or listening to God’s creation. Science gives me knowledge and skills. God is in the crisis. It is our job to trust, to hope, to act and always to wonder. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 242 October 2019: 27